Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador affirmed yesterday that "there are no elements" to support the version that the Sinaloa cartel is behind the murder of Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.
“I would not dare to advance anything about the reasons because there are no elements. They are, if anything, hypotheses and they can even be conjectures, we must not forget that things are always invented, and even more so in electoral times," the president declared in his morning press conference.
The president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, had pointed to organized crime for the attack against the candidate, who revealed on July 31 that he had received threats from José Adolfo Macías Villamar, alias Fito, identified as the leader of Los Choneros, a group with ties to the Mexican Sinaloa cartel.
López Obrador denied that the Government of Mexico has any information in this regard. “We do not have that information, and it does strike me that they immediately begin to distribute blame in a very sensationalist and not very serious and not very responsible way in authorities and information media, which in most cases are manipulation, not media. information," he said.
The Mexican president called for "acting very responsibly, very seriously, not lightly blaming anyone, waiting for the investigations, and waiting for the results of the investigation to be made known and for those responsible to be punished."
López Obrador, like all the leaders of Latin America, condemned the assassination. "These are very difficult, unfortunate moments and also reprehensible, very painful events," he said. And he compared what happened with the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, in March 1994. “We suffered it, we suffered it, when the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio. Many must remember those sad moments, of anguish, fear, fear, that is why we are very sorry that this has happened in Ecuador”, he indicated.
The Sinaloa cartel, also known as the Pacific cartel, is a Mexican criminal organization dedicated to drug trafficking and different criminal activities, mainly from Culiacán, capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa,
After seizing the territories dominated by the Juárez and Tijuana cartels a few years ago, the Sinaloa cartel now operates in half the states of Mexico and almost the entire border with the United States. And it currently competes and is at war with the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel.
The visible command of the organization since the capture (for the third time) and extradition to the United States of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán is in the hands of Ismael El Mayo Zambada.
On Wednesday, the same day as the murder of Villavicencio, the US imposed sanctions on the Mexican drug traffickers Félix Núñez, alias El Changuito, and the brothers Alfonso and René Arzate, whom it accuses of being part of the Sinaloa cartel and participating in the trafficking of fentanyl, the drug that wreaks havoc.
He defines them as "extremely violent."
